1. Field of the Description
The present description relates, in general, to theme or amusement park rides, and, more particularly, to an amusement park ride providing passengers with a unique ride experience including vehicles with a swinging passenger compartment.
2. Relevant Background
Amusement and theme parks are popular worldwide with hundreds of millions of people visiting the parks each year. Park operators continuously seek new designs for rides that attract and entertain guests in new ways. Many parks include swing rides or rides that include a swinging passenger vehicle. However, there has been little advancement or change in these rides over the past decades. Such ride “staleness” can result in decreased enthusiasm in park visitors as the ride experience has become known and predictable, which can result in fewer first or at least in fewer repeat rides by park visitors.
There are a variety of well-known rides with swinging vehicles that are presently in use in amusement and theme parks. A conventional swing vehicle ride may use a round or flat ride configuration in which the passengers get in a chair or a vehicle with other passengers, and the center hub rotates about its axis with the passengers in their chairs or vehicles swung further and further outward (at a larger and larger radius) with increasing rotation speeds (and vice versa). The radius at which the ride is positioned relative to the center rotation axis is determined by speed of rotation (and weight of the passenger and the chair/vehicle) in most cases such that the swinging aspect of the ride experience is passive (e.g., not powered). Other systems have actuators that actively force the arms to swing.
In other swing rides, passenger vehicles are hung from a long rod or arm, and a motor is used to rotate the arm about a rotation axis passing through the arm at the end opposite the vehicles. The passenger vehicle is then “dropped” from a desired height, and the vehicle swings back and forth on the end of the arm about the rotation axis. The passengers typically are arranged to face in a direction orthogonal to the rotation axis so in one rotation or swinging direction (such as a clockwise rotation) the passengers are facing forward in the direction of swinging travel and in the other rotation or swinging direction (such as counterclockwise rotation) the passengers are facing away from the direction of swinging travel (e.g., they are dropped backward through the swing). The ride experience is much like that of a school yard swing but on a much larger scale.
Swinging sensations have also been provided in other types of rides. For example, many conventional roller coasters involve launching a vehicle that is suspended from a track. The vehicle may be free to pivot or rotate about its coupling with the track such that the passengers in the vehicle will have the sensation of flying outward as the vehicle rapidly travels around or banks curves in the track. The rotation or swinging of the vehicle is not powered (and neither is the roller coaster vehicle) but is instead dependent on the dynamics imparted to the vehicle from the track and speed of the vehicle.